


Tidal Equations

by idiotequed



Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst, Bonding, Canon Compliant, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Gossip, Horseshoe Crabs, Oysters, beach, idk how to tag this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-09
Updated: 2015-06-09
Packaged: 2018-04-03 17:02:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4108336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idiotequed/pseuds/idiotequed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>now it's so hard to separate my disappointments from his name.  </p><p>In short:  Anna and Hewlett spend a day at the beach.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tidal Equations

It seemed a miracle when the ground began to thaw and the air to warm. This winter had felt the longest and cruelest that she could remember, pushing long into Spring, though she allowed for the influence of circumstance in such judgment. Today tasted of Summer and Anna stood at the window, appreciating the cast of the late morning sun, bright on her hands and coloring her closed vision red. She debated whether she had nerve enough to let in the air, to open this window that was not hers, in this house that was not hers. She debated it and her hands gripped tighter at the windowsill, and she did not imagine Abe and his family together at the market. She did not think on the tension that built now between them, festering since she refused his plot, an open wound in the humid heat. She debated, did not imagine, and stood still in the sun until her mind emptied and she lost the clarity of time, deaf to the clock’s steady ticking, and deaf too to approaching footsteps.

“Mrs. Strong?” The disruption sounded a scant distance from her ear, jolting.

Surprise spun her toward the voice she ought to have recognized before sight, but her reverie had been too thick, too coasting. Hewlett stepped back, wincing with apology.

“I- Forgive me, I’d attempted to attract your attention more gently, but... I've disturbed you." Hewlett said and began to turn.

"No," Anna replied, then echoed it, finding it true and so bearing repetition. "No, not at all. Were you wanting something?"

"Ah," Hewlett smiled, bolstered by her reassurance, and cocked his head toward the window. "Yes. Rather, I was hoping. It is a lovely day, is it not?"

Quizzical, her brow furrowing with it, Anna nodded. "I think it the first hint of true Summer, and welcome it."

"Oh, indeed. Yes, I... well-said, that is precisely so. I thought, more I hoped, perhaps you might join me on a stroll. We could--" his lips pursed, appreciative of what they shaped, "welcome Summer together."

Anna looked at him, then glanced a moment through the glass, along and past the stretch of lawn. She smiled.

 

\--

 

June remained uncommonly cool so close to July, but Anna felt glad for the lesser oppression of the midday sun and for the breeze. It stirred her curls over her cheeks and eased the confines of her sleeves; the fabric may have been lighter, but on a stifling Summer day even the most forgiving dress suffocated. As they followed the path from Whitehall, Anna permitted her gaze to stray sidelong, noting the faint perspiration over Hewlett’s lip. He had wrestled with the propriety of his attire, wisely settling on a kinder jacket rather than the stiff, uniformed red, but even without Winter’s wool lining, she expected a margin of daily suffering.

Once it would have given her a small prick of satisfaction to think it, a petty sense of victory to which she would nonetheless hold fast. Now, musing over Hewlett’s profile, a different sort of sentiment entirely settled in her, and she could not think how to define it, remembering instead Abe’s derision. It squeezed in her and her fingers tightened at her side. She took a breath, needing it sharp. 

Hewlett looked to her just as she wrenched her gaze toward the town. Anna struggled to maintain a neutral expression until she no longer felt his attention. There was no peace in its passing. No sooner had he strayed to the bustling of Setauket than began the other stares, in ever mounting number. 

It seemed to Anna that whenever she had either grown used to them, her skin thickening by the day, or they had grown tired of gossiping over and finding fault in her, some new thing rose to mark her. If not the known break of her engagement, then her husband’s arrest and with it her reputation as complicit rebel and the removal of her property; if not her abandonment of her husband, then what Simcoe so publicly demanded of her. Now she resided again in Whitehall, with both her previous fiancé and a man whose affection had been little secret to the town since her afternoon with Mary and the other women; a man with whom she now walked in companionable comfort.  


She would wonder over it, that she did feel a true comfort, but for the weight of them. Her ribs were bars of impenetrable steel against which her heart beat, wings bruised from the long effort.

Hewlett sounded immune to it, bidding both cursory and hearty greetings, matching tone with whosoever first offered. He asked after crops and sniffling children, hearing replies that Anna knew as too polite and decidedly patient. She smiled at the women as they exchanged nods, recognizing the disconnect between their mouths and their eyes.

Anna held her head aloft, as she ever had, but how her neck ached.

After they parted with the DeJong’s, Hewlett looked again to her, lifting his hand in a stalled motion.

“I should apologize again, Mrs. Strong.”

He rushed through her confused silence.

“I think… despite our successes and the rightness of our intentions, I think Setauket has born much for my sake. That is, I… you should know, I have long believed that in time the people would truly embrace us, but for every step forward we are soon compelled to gallop three back, and perhaps I shouldn’t have dragged you…”

Anna realized as he babbled that yet again, inexplicably, Hewlett blamed himself for the awkwardness that resulted from her presence. It showed a surprising astuteness from him, who oft tended toward a focused oblivion, as it would be a falsehood to claim that all warmly accepted him and his men, especially after the difficulties with Simcoe. By his persistence in keeping at her side he accepted a different yet no less pungent sort of strain. That in turn showed a pointed blind spot. Anna shook her head, wondering at the contradiction before stopping him.

“Major, it isn’t you.”

His mouth puckered with doubt. 

“Well,” she allowed, “not entirely. You must know I am not so well-regarded. The apology should—”

“No,” he interrupted. “I won’t hear of it.”

Hewlett had not sounded so firm with her in at least a year and they stopped with it. They looked at each other, frozen on the road between the nearest shops and the winding down to the docks. The smell of the sea reached Anna, familiar and sharp. She swallowed, choking down the bitter taste of her joy at having been prevented from an insincere apology. It felt compulsory, necessary, that which every eye sought to pry out of her and deem still unsatisfactory. 

She should not need to apologize and she should not feel relieved to be spared it. Should not, should not, should not. Anna thought she might shout. They would certainly talk about that, she mused, her mouth twisting. Mrs. Strong stepped out with Major Hewlett and began shrieking in broad daylight. 

“…Perhaps we should go back,” he offered.

Anna gazed down toward the docks then looked back over the town, through which they would need walk once more. They would meet again the DeJong’s, the other families, perhaps even the Woodhull’s, until finally the walls of Whitehall closed again around her, better only by increments than the tavern. She let a breath of air travel through her and on the exhale her eyes drifted over the grasses, to the trees spotting along the shore.

She tilted her head, her teeth pulling at her lip. 

“It would be a shame to lose this day. Major… would you be open to a detour?” 

 

\--

 

Anna lead Hewlett fifteen minutes through the thickening trees. Much of what had once been well-traversed nature had now reclaimed; what she knew to avoid now caught at her dress or surged up underfoot. It suggested to her the years since she last crept here, clandestine and giddy with it, bright with the young certainty of love. Hewlett kept quiet though his limp worsened over rough ground, his vague understanding enough; she explained only that she used to play there as a girl.

The trees opened on a secluded inlet, the bay shielded by rising rock and the woods. Anna sighed to see it: the pale sands, the stones, the water rolling mildly to shore, even an oyster bed. 

“It looks just the same,” she said, finding her voice wet and swallowing past it. 

She noted from her periphery his turn from regard of the beach, to look instead upon her, his eyes soft and his voice matching it.

“You said you once played here?” He asked. 

“Yes.” 

“It is an oasis,” he said, gruff with conviction. 

They stood together in the shade of the wood’s end, inhaling the brine of the air, watching the sea as it rose and curled into itself, sweeping in and crashing, spreading. A few seagulls pecked along the oyster bed, alternating between determined if not yet fruitful attempts on the shells and lifting with coarse cries to the sky. It felt as though she peered through time itself, as though she would blink and open her eyes to see Caleb and Sam shoving Ben beneath the water, to see Abe with his hoop, to hear herself insisting on being allowed to play Soldier and only quieting Caleb once whacking him with her stick, and how Abe had laughed. It felt as though she might blink and see Abe older, his face warm as he held her, as he kissed her. Once the sun shifted enough to tilt the shadows further, Anna moved forward onto the beach, her breathing longer and deeper.

Hewlett followed a step behind. It seemed measured. She appreciated his tentative precision.

She wondered if it was a betrayal to bring him here. It had never been a singular thing, however they claimed it through the years, transitioning from a childhood play space to a secret place she and Abe shared, escorted and encouraged by the others, to land left abandoned by all but the creatures to which it originally belonged. 

Anna remembered the last time she stood on these sands and paused in her pace, closing her eyes. Hewlett slowed, now beside her, waiting a minute before speaking.

“If I may… what did you play?” 

She opened her eyes, regarding him alongside his question, the sun lighting his eyelashes and forcing him to squint. 

“Oh… the usual children’s games. Bowling hoops and anything with a chase in it. Ben was especially keen on Soldier and with Sam backing him they usually had their way; Caleb went along with it but often decided he’d much rather be a pirate, to which Ben would say he couldn’t, and they’d squabble until Abe settled them.”

As she continued in the recounting of the memory, her voice sparked with it, laughing. Hewlett smiled, his eyes crinkling. 

“You played Soldier too, Mrs. Strong?”

Anna sharpened her smile, “Why, what else could I do when Caleb went about telling me, ‘Oh no, Anna, you’ve got to sit at home with five fat babes and wait for us to bring back the spoils?’” 

Hewlett laughed, and though throaty, it sounded higher and freer than his voice tended. The thought of betrayal returned to her again, now as if at a distance. Though she spoke so candidly of her friendship with Caleb and Ben, well-known to Hewlett as Patriot soldiers, she felt a curious lack of misgiving in her heart and perceived, too, the absence of anything but delight in his face. 

She chanced letting further go.

“Edmund,” she teased, “you must think me terribly uncouth.”

It might have been the glow of the sun, but she thought she saw his cheeks spot pink. 

“Never,” he answered, swift and emphatic, striving for severe but the amused gravel in it gave him fully away.

“Really? Even if I were to say… we used to swim and play leapfrog, which I was quite good at skirts or no, and I won my fair share of oyster eating contests?” 

Another bark of laughter, but Hewlett composed himself, staring at her with wide eyes, his lips trembling to keep back greater mirth. 

“Mrs. Strong, are you trying to scandalize me?” 

Anna affected wounded innocence.

“So you admit it: my past is scandalous to you.” 

His mouth flapped in protest, but before he could manage to speak it, he dissolved into giggles, waving a hand helplessly in the air between them. Anna stared, her heartbeat quickened by the not unpleasant surprise of both her own smile and the curious sight of Major Edmund Hewlett with his face scrunched up in boyish amusement.

“No, I… No, that isn’t, oh, Mrs. Strong—“

“Anna,” she interjected, quickly, before she could think to stop herself.

Hewlett stilled, the question in his stare.

“At least,” she clarified, “when we are in private.”

It seemed to Anna that his smile might split his face clean in two. 

“Anna,” he echoed, savoring it. “Anna, I think it sounds wonderful, all of it.”

“Wonderful?”

“Wonderful. Wild, yes, but you shouldn’t have been any other way.”

“That’s an odd way to put it.” She raised her eyebrows.

“Ah, well… my boyhood looked rather different and so I may be susceptible to romanticizing yours. I hope it not too forward to say that I… I like to imagine you so young and so bold.” It could not only be the sun now that would lend such color to his face. “I fancy you were quite... quite adorable, if also and all the more for that wild streak.”  


Anna smiled at him until the air between them was heavy with it, and warm, and she knew she must look away. She glanced askance, down at dried seaweed caught on the sands from the morning’s high tide. 

“My mother was in constant distress over the state of my dress.”

“Of course,” his voice thrummed with amusement.

“…I sank all of Caleb’s ships,” she boasted, sharing her grin with the weeds and knowing he heard it.

Again he laughed.

 

\--

 

They wandered closer to the oyster bed. Anna hesitated only a moment before crouching and beginning to pry one loose. She looked over her shoulder, noting a queer expression shifting on Hewlett’s face.

“Have you ever had one?” She asked, wriggling the shell and leaning back as she pulled.

“Er, yes. They are fair abundant in Edinburgh.” He sounded faint.

“Never fresh from the shell, right off the beach, I’m sure.” Anna’s confidence in this bit of mischief began to fade; he looked green. 

“No, but I…” 

“…aren’t a fan?” She hazarded. 

“I may have lost my taste for them,” he confessed. 

Anna smiled, releasing the shell and standing, brushing her palms on her skirt. “I suppose we’ll have to forego the contest.”

He chuckled through his cringe, regaining some color. “I am quite comfortable ruling you the undisputed victor.” 

 

\--

 

The sun trundled across the sky and their shadows lengthened. She asked after his childhood and learned, with little surprise, that he had spent it most with books and in the company of his parents and their friends; great men, not a whit would he exchange. She sensed it left him out of place with most those his age, however the overall atmosphere was conducive to it in Edinburgh. She heard the longing in his voice as an old ache, entrenched and scarring. Before she could map how she intended to ask, he distracted himself and soon her with the steadily approaching water.

In response to his inquiry, she was pleased to tip her chin just so and tell him that of course she knew what caused the tides, the moon, sir. 

Hewlett beamed, but could not keep himself from expanding on that preliminary concept, a plethora of names rattling off his tongue: Seleucus, Abu Ma’shar, Stevin and Kepler, Galileo, and finally Isaac Newton. Or, as he said it, Sir Isaac Newton himself, and fair gushed through a short overview of the relevant pieces of the _Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica_. Anna attempted to keep it all in her head, torn between marvel and mild irritation. She did not intend the latter and duly resisted it, only it was so much. 

She felt small beside it, rough-edged and indeed wild, and too abruptly aware of it. By the time he began on Lap Place’s tidal equations, she was entirely lost for at least nine minutes and the sand gave way to rock. Anna stooped to palm a small, flat stone and straightened, swinging with it to send the stone skipping over the water. She counted eleven before it sank. Beside her, Hewlett went stark silent, his eyes darting between her hand and the sea.

“Goodness! However did you…” He bent for one of his own and contemplated it, his eyes still moving. Rolling his hand on his wrist, he squared his shoulders and tossed it.  


The stone sank without so much as a wobble. 

Anna giggled. Not even the baleful look he directed at her, his eyes wretched with embarrassed reproach, could move her into feigned apology. 

“It is in the wrist,” she advised once trusting her voice and performed once more for example. 

Hewlett crouched, picked up three stones, and attempted again with the first. It skipped once before its resounding _thunk_. Anna would swear that he began to pout, which only made her laughter worse.

“Now,” he groused, grave and sheepish, “you laugh at me.” 

“No—“

Hewlett looked at her.

“…yes.”

She could see it in the brightness of his eyes, their heavy contrast to the petulance he exaggerated on his features: he _liked_ that she laughed at him.

Anna found she liked no less to be laughing. 

“Here,” she said, stepping closer as her humor ebbed, “hold your wrist like this…”

Her fingers closed around his wrist. They looked small against it and his skin was warm. She felt his pulse beneath her index finger and how it raced, though he stood so still, as if he hardly breathed. Anna remembered herself and stepped back, her face feeling warm, then scalding. She took another step before swiftly skipping one more stone of her own. Her heart must have leapt alongside it those eight times.

“Thank you,” she heard him say, little more than a whisper. He threw no more, but neither did he release his stones to the ground. The small movement he made let her assume that he pocketed them. 

 

\--

 

“It cannot be!” Hewlett broke their leisured retracing to jog across the sand, hunching over a black creature on the beach, his hands braced on his knees as he gaped down. Anna hastened to meet him, recognizing as she neared that he exclaimed over a horsehoe crab. Unable to reason why such a thing would merit his response, Anna shrugged. 

“Why can’t it?” 

“Why, it’s a _Monoculus polyphemus_ , it must be. Linnaeus put them in India! That is, proper India…” He behaved most queerly: dropping his hands to a mere inch above its body, his face narrow with enthusiasm, then contorted, his lips curling back as he raised his hands again, fingers wriggling in the air.  


Anna stared.

“It is a horseshoe crab,” she said, slowly, keeping to what she knew, and she at least knew that. “They’ve been here as long as I have and I expect longer. Caleb used to make games with the poor things.” 

Bending as well, Anna watched the continued maneuvering of his hands before shaking her head and reaching to take firm hold of the crab, so to turn it over in the sand. Its tail stabbed down at the wet sand, but she kept it from righting itself, her eyes on Hewlett’s face. As if a small boy, his face wrinkled with giddy disgust as he watched its legs move, scuttling against the air. 

“Oh, it’s hideous, but it’s wonderful, too. How fascinating. It _is_ a—you see,” he wrenched his eyes from it and to her, “Carl Linnaeus, a Swede, he’s managed to classify so much of the life on our planet! It’s a tremendous effort, he’s rather more keen on plants but thousands upon thousands, Anna, he is finding both God’s order and man’s, and he—oh I cannot believe you are touching it!”

Anna wondered if she ought come to expect this conflicting sensation, of both intense amusement and amazement at the breadth of what he stored in his head, and the faint headache of having so little ability to yet grasp it. Her mouth quirked lopsided into her cheek and she wrestled with a rather Caleb-like compulsion to thrust it up into his face. 

“They are harmless. Rather sweet, even,” she assured, and slowly began to raise the crab, or the mono—the crab. 

Hewlett leaned away, then forward, weaving between his own instincts. After another half-minute of this, he lowered his hand, daring to slide a knuckle down its body. Its legs flailed and he yanked back, almost tipping over, a breathless chuckle in his throat.

Shaking her head, Anna released it, and together they watched it flip over and scamper away. It seemed to her rather indignant. She might be too, given a mouthful of a name like that when "crab" sufficed.

Anna questioned the wisdom of it before yielding to a question: “Why… Mono-culus Poly-fee-muss?” 

“ _Monoculus polyphemus_ ,” he corrected, automatic, and continued, “as it translates to one-eyed Polyphemus, who was of course the Cyclops whom Odysseus bested, I imagine—“

Hewlett, speaking in a happy rush to that point, stopped himself, recognizing something in her face. 

“…perhaps another time?” he asked.

“Please,” she said and meant it. He did not seem wounded or abashed, merely understanding, yet he also could not resist one last comment.

“I must write—someone about this,” he fair chirped. 

 

\--

 

They resumed walking, the sun closing in upon the horizon. Anna thought of a man traversing the world to look at plants and animals and categorize them. She thought of men observing the patterns of the ocean’s tides and seeing mathematics, and seeing the pull of a celestial body. She thought of Hewlett, of Edmund, brimming and spilling with joy to only describe these wonders, to have a willing ear, and what comparative tedium must fill most his day. She risked a longer moment of observation, finding the tension and prim austerity much drained from him here, his face resting not in severity but a slight and easy smile. He dragged his foot some still, compensating as needed, all of it more pronounced now after these hours of standing and movement, but rather than any indication of discomfort, she saw only serenity. 

She thought of Abe, but resenting the intrusion, severed it before it could become rooted and conscious. It festered.

As they approached the trees from whence they came, Anna slowed, remembering again the last evening she stood on this beach. She had begged Ben to bring Abe to her: Thomas had died two weeks before and it had been one week since Abe ended their engagement. If only she could speak to him privately, if only they could see one another without the rest, without the world bearing down upon him, then he would not do this thing. Ben returned without Abe; his respective fury with Abe and sympathy for her did little to assuage and she ignored his urging to the contrary, waiting until close to sunrise, believing that he would change his mind. She had needed to believe it. 

Anna realized she halted completely when pain brought her back to the present, her nails digging too hard into her palm, if not yet cutting. She knew Hewlett waited, patient still, ever with the gentle pressure of his eyes. 

“Is it strange to be here?” he asked in another bout of intuition. 

She managed a brittle smile. 

“Thank you for sharing it,” he murmured.

Whether she regretted it or relished it, this arguable tarnishing of memory and past, she could not decide. It would be a shame to let a place so lovely be wrecked by what could not be reclaimed, yet it hurt. She might have erred in bringing him here, more in returning herself.

“This isn’t where I expected to be,” she said, a quiet and unhappy admission, “I imagined my life so differently.”

Anna expected this: for Hewlett to inquire, innocent and still short-sighted, as to what she imagined. She anticipated Hewlett to again veer into the romantic, to want to picture her girlish dreams. She expected him to ask after what she had lost, what should have been hers, and she did not know if she could manage an answer without fury, without despair, without all that still raged and wretched in her.

She did not expect him to laugh, the throb of it low and strained, and say, “As did I.” 

The weight of the miniscule, mounting observations she had made today crushed her, only it felt less an oppressive crash, and more like metal bars snapping, within them a fluttering; not light, but resonant. They caught one another’s eyes and it passed between them.

“Edmund,” she started, pausing not with hesitation but care, “were you ever angry?”

Before this moment, she would have expected one answer. That expectation dwindled and so she felt no surprise by his wry lips as they shaped difference.

“Oh yes.” Hewlett nodded, his jaw clenching through the deliberate motion of it, his eyes focused on the sky beginning to orange. “I told myself what I ought to, of course. I tried to convince myself it was an unanticipated opportunity and that God, in his greater wisdom, had planned it. Privately, I considered such as I always had prior: the placation of the weak and needing. It was a small, hollow comfort. For a time, though I was rather too old for it, I wrestled with reactive blame: against my father, against America, which perhaps fueled some initial… well…” 

He trailed off, here shame casting its long shadow. Anna resisted the abrupt and heady impulse to place her hand upon his arm. He recovered as she struggled.

“…I think what defines us, what makes _man_ , is less the presence of the baser emotions, but how we respond to them. I cannot say I have always reacted as is ideal. Disappointment may be typical and it a selfish thing to complain as if one is in some fashion unique and entitled to exception, but…”

Their eyes met once more and he knew her. She understood it, understood the depths of it, that while he might lack some or even most of the details, he knew. 

“…to have satisfaction and dream in your hands, then have it snatched away without recompense... I think I am not over lenient to excuse a measure of resentment.”

It was only that her eyes began to itch that compelled her hands to them, that necessitated she look away. 

 

\--

****

****

  


They reached Whitehall with the sun halved, the sky awash in red and violet. Few remained in the streets on their return, though Anna knew better than to think their disappearance went unnoticed and without speculation. She wondered whether Hewlett had that same awareness, or if the better question was, whether or not he cared. Perhaps it was due to his relative ease, free to leave this place when the war concluded. 

That thought anchored in her, a new ache along its chain. She knew part of it as envy. She knew the other part, too, but she fought it or had been fighting it, only made aware by what Abe had jeered. 

Hewlett made for the stairs and Anna intended the drawing room, but his aborted motion stalled her as well. When he turned back to her, she was waiting.

“Anna, I… I no longer think it placation. I wouldn't presume to apply it to any but my circumstances, but recently I've come to believe in it. …that plan.”

At first, Anna reeled, seconds of the raw return of isolation, of the sour reminder that he would be better and without conflict, admirable but unreachable. After all that he suffered, after Simcoe’s machinations, that he could identify and profess a faith in _God’s plan_ was too sainted. Her face must give her away, yet his never changed, which prompted a second look.

His eyes made such an entreaty. Unbidden, she remembered his pulse beneath her finger. 

It could not have been so very long since what he impressed upon her now would have sent her skin to crawling. Anna marveled at yet another thing this day: the embers in her chest, flickering, beating.

“Thank you for the walk, Edmund.” She smiled and it did not strain, and it ached less.

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Would you believe this was originally conceived as from Hewlett's perspective? At one point he was going to marvel that she had been friends with so many rebels, not to speak of her family, yet retained loyalty. What a gal, eh Hewlett.
> 
> 2) ...so there's plenty of inaccuracy in this because I am terrified of period pieces. I also looked things up, like the Linnaeus nonsense (like the tide stuff is obviously straight wiki, but I looked up the ACTUAL PAGES from the systema man...), and then realized that actual sketches of everything probably weren't released until later, so he probably shouldn't know what a horseshoe crab looks like. But, man, I looked it up, and I wanted to include like the ONE THING I actually know about from growing up on Long Island (I am vaguely aware there are horsehoe crabs...I hate the beach, sorry), so whatever I cheated.
> 
> 3) Sorry my style's so boring I rarely write at all never mind longer pieces, but this wanted out of my head and I adore them.


End file.
